It wasn’t all that long ago that most people hadn’t heard of “blogs”, and those that had considered them little more than digital diary run by the nerdiest of techno-geeks.
Today nothing could be further from the truth.
Blogs make up the bedrock of our online experience today. So much more than just digital journals or diaries, today’s blogs are maybe the most influential types of websites on the planet – used by news organizations, governmental operations, and businesses large and small to influence billions of people around the world.
In a nutshell, if you’re not taking your business blog seriously you are losing out to competitors that are.
Thankfully though, blogging for business success is a lot easier than most people make it out to be. With the inside information we highlight below you will be able to hit the ground running, crafting much more influential content for your target market web building up your influence, your credibility, and your stature in your industry along the way.
Let’s dive right in!
THIS is the most important thing you can do when blogging for business
Right out of the gate, you need to avoid the biggest mistake so many businesses – large and small – make when they start to blog, and that’s making the mistake of creating content and writing posts that they themselves find interesting without considering their audience.
Your blog might seem to be something you are creating for your own purposes, or a tool you want to use to boost your business, but at the end of the day your blog needs to be valuable to your visitors and your readers – or it isn’t going to gain any traction at all.
The most important thing you can do when you are blogging for business is figuring out what your visitors, your readers, or your ideal prospects are interested in most and then crafting content for them specifically. If you’re posting updates that you find interesting, or just posting updates to post updates over there which is even worse) you’ll find out pretty quickly that your blog is actually hurting your business rather than helping.
Constantly collect content ideas
It’s a good idea to always be on the lookout for new ideas for blog content that you can post, collecting these ideas in a digital document so that you never have a shortage of things to write about.
Trying to come up with ideas for new blog posts out of thin air is always an uphill battle. Pay attention of the kinds of posts and content written on blogs that you love to read, scan magazines and newspapers – dealing with your industry and any other industry, for that matter – and you’ll be able to come up with more ideas for content than you ever thought possible.
The more ideas you are able to cook up and catalog, the stronger your blog content will be. You’ll never feel like you are up against a wall when it comes time to post something new and you’ll always be able to fall back on this library of great ideas to generate the spark you need to produce top-tier content.
Build your posts off of proven formulas
Not only will building all of your blog posts for business off of proven formulas dramatically speed up your production time, but it’s also going to go a long way to improve the influence and credibility your blog has with your readers.
We human beings are creatures of habit. We don’t love change, we don’t love when things stand apart from the rest of the pack, and we don’t love when our expectations are violated and we are dropped into something that we don’t feel completely certain about.
By all means, shake things up with the formulas you use to write your blogs – producing top 10 lists, comparison content, expert interviews, guide posts, and more – but try to stick to a template or formula with each individual post and keep them consistent across your blog to improve the effectiveness of your writing.
Stick to a posting schedule
The best blogs out there on the web today aren’t just the ones with engaging content flooding the blog on a regular basis, but are also the blogs that have a posting schedule or posting calendar that you could set your watch to.
Sporadic postings are going to lead to a schizophrenic reader base, and it’s going to cut down significantly on your effectiveness as well as your influence. Instead you want to come up with a posting schedule that you can stick to like glue, running your blog the same way that your favorite TV shows do.
There’s a reason why Sunday in the fall and in the winter is absolutely dominated by the NFL, for example. Sure, they have a game every Monday night and a game every Thursday night as – but everyone (EVERYONE, whether they watch football or not) knows that someday is going to be filled from morning till night with games.
You want your blog readers to have that same kind of expectation about new content pieces hitting your blog.
Don’t be shy about courting a little bit of controversy
Today almost every business has a blog, so much so that online visitors are starting to tune in these kinds of platforms just because they have been flooded by so-so options that do anything but grab them and compel them to read on.
The best thing you can do to rise above this kind of complacency is to court a little bit of controversy. Figure out where your ideal prospect and perfect customer stands on certain issues and take the same kind of principled stance.
Sure, you’re going to turn off some of your readers completely when you take this black and white kind of approach to producing content for your blog. But as long as your opinion is in line with your readers and your perfect customer – the ones that are going to spend money with you – you aren’t going to be hurting your business at all by pushing away those that likely warrant going to be customers of yours in the first place.
Take advantage of these tips and tricks when it comes time to do your blogging about business and you will enjoy a lot more success than you might have otherwise!